Music, Emotion, and Fish with Dr. David Bashwiner
We are back, with Part 2 of ‘Music, Emotion, and Fish’. If you haven’t had the chance to listen to Part 1, you can click back to Episode 15, Dr. David Bashwiner was just getting to his work on the Midshipman toadfish, and what it can teach us about musical desire in humans. In Part 1, Dr. Bashwiner described the ongoing debate in music theory as to whether music has some sort of evolutionary significance by impacting our ability to pass on our genes, and why focusing too much on this question is distracting. We then talked about what made him want to study the midshipman fish and ended on the drive behind his research – wanting to understand the response of the listener to sound and their appreciation of music.
Kaitlin Bryson Selected for 2026 Cohort for Monument Lab Re:Generation!
Congratulations to Kaitlin Bryson for being selected to take part in the 2026 cohort for Monument Lab Re:Generation! She received a $100,000 grant for her ongoing project, Bellow Forth. Bellow Forth is a community project focused on restoring soil health and environmental resiliency through storytelling and collaboration, community and ecosystem science, and social art practice in wildfire-impacted lands and communities in northern New Mexico.
Alum Highlight: Eric-Paul Riege Receives 2025 Trellis Art Fund Grant
Eric-Paul Riege, a Gallup-based Diné artist and recent UNM graduate, has been recognized as a 2025 Stepping Stone Grantee by the Trellis Art Fund. His multidisciplinary practice uses weaving as both process and philosophy, blending ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and contemporary art to create works that are living, mobile, and deeply connected to cultural memory.
Neon Forge: Expanding Immersive Art Through NASA-Funded VR Innovation
Congratulations to MFA graduate student Ella Pigg and undergraduate student Finn Ellis on the success of their project, Neon Forge.